Drifting wrote:I notice that, whilst focussing on being upset about the magazine cover, no official or unofficial repudiation of the figures in the article is happening...
Actually it is...
From the church's response to the recent BusinessWeek article:
"Today, the Church’s business assets support the Church’s mission and principles by serving as a rainy day fund. Agricultural holdings now operated as for-profit enterprises can be converted into welfare farms in the event of a global food crisis. Companies such as KSL Television and the Deseret News provide strategically valuable communication tools."
Infymus, that's not actually a repudiation of the figures in the article, just a repudiation of its conclusions.
Shixon1 wrote:I found it interesting that people made such a big deal about the cover. I thought the article was pretty good for how transparent the finances of the church are. I think the church wanted to make a big deal about how offensive the cover was so that members wouldn't want to read it.
Infymus wrote:Multi million dollar hotel in Hawaii? Turns into housing during a crisis!
Game reserve? Can be turned into farms!
Who writes this tripe. Oh yeah, the LDS Cult does.
Anyone can use excuses like that. My 60" flat screen TV can be used to watch General Conference. My iPad has an LDS scripture app. My Porsche can give orphan children a ride to church. My pool can be turned into a baptismal font. My Rolex can be used to tell time after a natural disaster destroys all the clocks.
"We have taken up arms in defense of our liberty, our property, our wives, and our children; we are determined to preserve them, or die." - Captain Moroni - 'Address to the Inhabitants of Canada' 1775
This is a lampoon, and is meant to be humorous. Although distasteful, there is no falsehoods being presented in the caption. Let's face it. LDS Inc. resembles a for-profit business moreso than it does a religion.
Asked for a response, Bloomberg spokeswoman Rachel Nagler said that the cover image comes from an 1898 lithograph "recording a pivotal moment in the birth of Mormonism."
The article itself is not satirical. It states that the LDS church owns media companies, a hospitality business, an insurance firm with assets of $3 billion, an agricultural company with 1 million acres in the U.S., and an ample real estate portfolio.
The church also makes money through an investment fund and trust company, according to the article.
In all, the LDS church is worth about $40 billion, according to a study cited in the article, and takes in $8 billion each year in tithes.
"What is remarkable is how varied the church's business interests are and that so little is known about its financial interests," writes Bloomberg Businessweek reporter Caroline Winter.
Meanwhile, the LDS church donates less than one percent of its annual income to charity, according to a study cited in the article. Other churches donate nearly 30 percent.
I wonder what would qualify as "income"?
- VRDRC
In the face of madness, rationality has no power - Xiao Wang, US historiographer, 2287 AD.
Every record...falsified, every book rewritten...every statue...has been renamed or torn down, every date...altered...the process is continuing...minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Ideology is always right.
Kishkumen wrote:Well, that's the rub, right? Mormonism has always mixed worldly business with religion, since it was conceived, very early on, as a religious "state within a state."
And that practice has always been problematic. From treasure digging to the Anti-Banking society to patriarchal blessings for a fee and the display of mummies in the days of Joseph Smith to the failure of a charitable organization to disclose its finances, Mormonism's relationship to money remains ethically wanting.
If there is a tradition of bad behavior, it should not follow that bad behavior somehow becomes normal and above reproach or ridicule.
The Church use to own a lot of hospitals. The church gave or sold the hospitals to the nonprofit organization Intermountian Health Care . The thing is that I heard one time that the church runs or has ties to the non profit organization. Does anyone know who runs Intermountian Health Care now?